What One Woman Learned Trying to Run Across California | National Geographic
There's a lot of debate about how professional runners should be left for the elite, and then on the other side, professional runners should just be anyone who's making a living through running. I fit squarely in neither of those categories. [Music] I would not describe myself as a professional runner. Running for me is, is for me all day at work. You have this voice in your head like you don't dress nice enough, and I'm executive enough, whatever it is. But running is the one thing where I can be like, yeah, I can run across the state, why not try?
You know, my goal for me is to be the fastest known woman to run across California, from North Lake Tahoe to Stinson Beach. Planning to take 10 days, but maybe we'll go even faster than that. Two of my friends were just like, yeah, I'll support you doing this thing. We have a base plan; I'm going to run every day and then one personal drive bag and one person over on must meet. We're really just going to see what happens. It could be that I'm like sitting here doing the interview and in five days those three are sitting on the side of the road being like, don't know why every year.
Like, I need to run across my state or do my first ultra marathon or whatever it is. It's just something that I do. [Music] So there's definitely been periods in my life where I feel lonely, even when you're surrounded by people like at work in an office or something. But I'm on the trail by myself, yeah, I don't feel alone. I mean, that's why I run. There was magic in the middle days because when you start your third marathon in a row and you have legs, you're like, my body is amazing. This is crazy!
Today we ran from Robinson Flat into a little bit caught for sale. Might eat builders just my legs are tired now. A few blisters, so seems still good run. No bad pain yet, but I'm really excited about that. After this, planning to have cooldown, lost few miles, and then I'm really hoping my friends will want to go to brunch with me and give me a nice back.
I know how much running has given me and I want other women to have that. When they look on the starting line, they don't see people that look like them, whether that's based on gender identity, racial identity, different body types. So to the degree that I can show up and help change that, I want to. On the sixth day, I was like, I don't know about this. I might not have legs; I ran maybe like twenty-two miles and all of a sudden, like my legs were not running anymore.
First, my butt gave out and then like my quads, and it was just kind of like my legs were going through the remaining muscles that were left. That was a moment for me because I don't think mentally I was in it to walk it. I remember in my head being like, this is going to be any interesting like, we'll see what my body has tomorrow. [Music] On the seventh day, I think I ran maybe like four miles and then it was just this brutal, long eight or nine-hour day, like walking. It was very painful to run. I didn't want to do anything that would make it so I couldn't run. A few weeks later, I made it basically today, which is cool.
Oh yeah, I know even after walking the whole day I can't really move my legs. Please, August 7th, my birthday, and we stopped in Fairfield short of our goal, of course. It's disappointing, but as Lexie Papa says, good thing I didn't accomplish all my goals yet. And what would I do tomorrow? I wanted to run, and I could have accomplished this goal if I like walked a little and ran a little, but I wanted to run. I mean, I'm a middle of the packer who ran 175 miles in one week. I wanted to run across California, and in doing that, I found out how far I could go. If that's the metric, then it was a success. [Music]